Critics reviews

[The Good, the Bad, the Weird] is a deliriously fun and often downright trippy homage to great train robberies, black-clad bad guys, and Occidental heroes, all done with enthusiastic panache. A better kickoff for the summer movie season is, frankly, difficult to imagine.

As vigorously staged as it all is — sometimes confusingly, occasionally with camera-torqueing flair and impressive stuntwork — the urge to thrill grows wearisome. Were audience members to be included as a collective character as well, they’d be “The Tired.”

[The Good, the Bad, and the Weird unfolds along] an overstuffed, confusing narrative that’s made even harder to follow by Mr. Kim’s clumsy staging of the big action set pieces.

The Good, the Bad, the Weird, [is] an exuberant tale of greed, vengeance and, well, weirdness. Writer-director Kim Jee-Woon's kimchee western doesn't transcend its models, but the movie has so much fun that its debts are easily forgiven.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird’s real strength is in the way it establishes what it’s going to be about right from the start... Kim’s inventive action sequences develop like short films, with their own plots and props.

Unfortunately, the glorious excesses that make The Good, the Bad, the Weird, so good and weird, also have a deadening effect. Some of the chase scenes drag on forever, the electric joy drained away as the movie approaches its second hour.

There’s not a lot that can be said about a film that excuses its inert, distended action scenes by arguing that its nihilistic characters and, by extension, their patchwork world simply cannot exist on their own terms anymore.

It's a picture of ferocious energy and excess, consciously influenced in its plot, music and visual style by Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as well as by the Indiana Jones movies. Over-extended, but extremely enjoyable.

Some fancy setpieces here and there, and gunplay just about everywhere, but none of the principals can begin to rival the sacred trio of Eli Wallach, Lee Van Cleef and the other one.

There's something strangely appropriate about plonking a highly ritualised cowboy movie in the far east; in director Kim Jo-woon's hands, it becomes a brutal, bloody dance, with a sky-high body count and arterial gore spraying across every scene... Not for the fainthearted, certainly, but it has an unembarassable elan that helps it avoid the pitfalls of campness and silliness.

Lee’s charismatic villainy and Song’s raffish glee bolster the slim plot, though the revelation here is the tall, lithe Jung, an actor of few words but striking physicality.

Despite its lengthy duration, this film gallops along... It's exciting, funny, thrilling, and as entertaining as hell – and proves, if proof be needed, that genre knows no borders.